


Pieces

by FidgetyWriter



Category: Left 4 Dead
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-31 19:58:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1035773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FidgetyWriter/pseuds/FidgetyWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Small one-shots from a romance an apocalypse almost denied. Non-chronological</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hands

Zoey had never held hands with anyone except her father.

It seemed sad when she thought about it. She couldn’t ever remember her mother reaching down to take her tiny hand when they crossed the street. She’d never had many friends to hold hands with. And considering that her asshole of a step-father had flat out asked her if she was a lesbian in the middle of last year’s Christmas dinner…well, she’d never been on a real date. 

So when she’d fallen and received a deep gash on her forearm (thankfully within yards of a safehouse), and Francis had practically hauled her inside where she tried not to cry, but _fuck_ there was so much blood, the last thing she expected was for Louis to kneel down beside her, reach out, and take her hand.

It meant more than she could manage to articulate at the moment. But he held onto her even as blood from the cut trickled down her arm and onto his hand. Even as Billy cursed under his breath and gingerly applied a rag to staunch the wound’s flow. Even as Francis tried to make jokes about it, and Zoey became so irritated with him that she punched his kneecap (which just made him laugh).

She found she could not will herself to release his hand, even when the cut had stopped bleeding and Bill and Francis had wandered off to some crates to restock on ammunition. Louis said nothing, apparently content to keep holding onto her until ten minutes later when she kicked open the door and the four of them hurried out onto the street in a burst of gunfire.


	2. Melt-Down

Louis found a bit of pride in the fact that he had stood by calmly in the three separate instances his companions had melted down.

He could not blame them in the slightest. The world had gone to shit in just two and a half weeks. They were always moving, always fighting and each day doing so on less food and less sleep than the previous day.

Francis had been the first to lose it. In the middle of a dinner of lukewarm canned food, he had suddenly stood up and started cursing, screaming, and kicking at any inanimate object he could find in the safe room. The commotion had drawn a number of Infected to the door, but they had no hope of breaking in. Regardless, Francis’ fury and the growls of the zombies had kept the other three awake for hours.

Zoey had been next; simply dissolving into tears and incoherence during one of the watches she shared with Louis. He had done his best to comfort her; to reassure her that things would get better. She said his words had helped, but he doubted her sincerity. His efforts had been rather feeble.

Finally, just two nights previously, Bill had grown unnaturally quiet and refused to speak for the entire leg of their journey to the airport. Once aboard the plane they’d helped refuel, he had turned away from the others and begun to sniffle rather frequently. When Zoey inquired as to his well-being, he practically snarled at her, and only apologized several hours later.

Louis knew his own meltdown would come the night it did long before it actually happened. The plane they’d escaped in had gone down, and, with it, their third attempt at rescue had failed. He could find nothing positive to say as the four of them made their way to a heavily barricaded room by a barn, nor as he lay down to sleep as Zoey and Bill took up the first watch.

As soon as he’d stretched out on the cold floor, all of the sorrow, grief, and dread of the past two weeks came up at once. He stifled the deep sobs by balling his fist in his mouth and prayed nobody would point his weakness out as it slid from his eyes and pooled under the cheek resting on his arm.

He jumped when someone placed a gentle hand on his back. Without looking, he knew it was Zoey, simply because of the small size of the fingers that traced circles on his shoulders. The warmth of her palm was inexplicably comforting.

For the first time in several nights, he actually slept.


	3. Angels

“Do you believe in an afterlife, Louis?”

He looked up from his assault rifle magazine that he had been half-heartedly cleaning out before they set off into the heart of Riverside.

“I do,” he told the nineteen year old who was staring forlornly out the upstairs window into the graveyard they’d just passed through. The mangled corpse of a Smoker who had, only moments before, been a coherent (albeit insane) human being who denied them entry into the safehouse lay just feet from her. She kept throwing uncomfortable glances at the body before returning her gaze to the graveyard.

“Like a heaven and hell kind of thing?” Francis opened his mouth to make a smart-ass remark, but Bill silenced him with a swat to the back of the head and a threatening glare.

“No, not really,” Louis told her, understanding the need for reassurance in a time like this. She had delivered the fatal shot to the Smoker on the floor-a clean rifle round through the head. “But I do think we go somewhere after we die…somewhere good.” He hoped his mother was there now.

“What about angels? Do you believe in them?”

Louis rose to his feet and joined her at the window. The church’s spotlight highlighted the statue of a weeping angel, bent low over a grave covered in a tangle of roots.

“I believe that you’re a good person, Zoey.”

She nodded, biting her lip hard and closing her eyes. Her breath hitched as she inhaled sharply. A single tear escaped her shut eyelids and ran down her pretty face. Louis wanted desperately to wipe it away. Instead, he laid a hand on her shoulder. She grabbed onto his index finger and squeezed it.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m okay. Come on, I bet I can kill more zombies than you.”

“Oh, pssh, please,” Louis retorted, glad to see Zoey return to her normal demeanor.

He let her get the first three Infected they spotted, regardless.


	4. Blood Soaked

It seemed to happen in slow motion. The Tank reached out and grabbed the cornered Zoey who was still futilely unloading round after round of her M1911 pistols into its face. Then, with a roar of rage, it flung her clear across the room. She hit her hip hard on the meeting table in the middle of the conference room before she collided audibly with the opposite wall.

Francis swore repeatedly before delivering four successive shotgun blasts to the Tank’s face. The beast gurgled feebly as it collapsed face-first onto the debris-strewn floor.

Louis was by her side in a second. She lay twisted in a motionless heap; a trickle of blood ran down from her hairline and stained her temple a delicate shade of pink. He gingerly untangled her legs and propped her head in the crook of his elbow.

“C’mon, Zoey, wake up! Don’t you die on me!”

She stirred listlessly in his arms for a moment before her eyes flickered open. He had never been so glad to see her green eyes.

“I knew you wouldn’t leave me,” she whispered.


	5. Impossible to Express

He'd liked Ellis six hours ago. He really had. But the more he thought about it, the more he found himself not wanting to think about the kid. 

He'd laughed off Zoey's playful gibes in the hospital about how he'd look in one of the gowns and at the airport where she'd repeatedly told him his row wasn't boarding yet. But, in reality, every teasing remark, every shared joke over movie lines and every quiet moment of understanding during the eerie hours of the watches they'd shared together made him ache. He ached because he had not met this hilarious, vulnerable, courageous, amazing girl before the end of the damn world. Because if he suspended his disbelief enough, sometimes he thought they could have had a shot together before all this...

But then Ellis had appeared and announced repeatedly to his companions that she was just so bee-yoo-ti-ful until they'd finally fallen out of earshot. And when he, Coach, Rochelle, and Colonel Sanders had miraculously appeared on the other side of the bridge he was still yammering on about how good she looked with a gun and how he wouldn't forget her. She'd called after him too, lamenting that she hadn't gone along with him.

Suddenly feeling like a whiny sixth grader, Louis struggled to his feet and limped out to the open deck of the bridge where Zoey was sitting and keeping watch while he and Francis were supposed to be sleeping inside. She was lazily scoping out and disposing of the few remaining Infected as they meandered toward the bridge. He was about to comment on a particularly good head shot she made when he noticed her face was coated in tears that she kept angrily wiping away.

"Bill?" he asked, guessing the cause of her anguish.

"Yup."

"You wanna be alone?"

"No, it's okay. I wouldn't mind the company." He gingerly sat down beside her, carefully stretching out his injured leg.

"Aren't you supposed to be sleeping?" she asked. 

"Couldn't in between all this thinkin' I've been doing and Francis snoring like a freight train." The corners of her mouth twitched as if it wanted to smile. 

"I kinda wish we'd gone with the other guys now," she said. "I mean, not all the way to the military again, but it'd be pretty cool to be riding around in a stock car instead of sitting up here. And Ellis's dumb stories would make me not think about...well...what happened."

"Sure," Louis said tersely. He knew his response was rude, almost biting, but hell if he wanted to hear her talk about Ellis again.  
Couldn't she tell how it was affecting him? She hadn't joked with Ellis about hospital gowns and airplane seating. Ellis didn't know that her parents were divorced or that she liked zombie movies. 

And Ellis had definitely not been there in that one awful moment back in Riverside when a Tank had thrown Zoey clear across a room or seen her head smash into the wall or watched her fall into a horrifyingly motionless heap. Nor had he taken her bloody face into his hands and felt as though he'd been reborn when she blinked back up at him. It was not to Ellis that she whispered "I knew you wouldn't leave me." Ellis had left her in Rayford while he sped off to New Orleans in his fancy car. Louis was still here. 

"Hey. You okay?" Zoey's voice snapped him out of his thoughts. "You sorta zoned out there?"

"Uh...yeah, sorry. Let's not talk about Ellis." She gave him a strange look.

"Um...okay." 

"Okay, good."

"What's this about, Louis? I thought you liked the guy."

"I appreciate his optimism."

"You appreciate-what the hell, man? What's wrong?"

"You...you just..." Louis found himself stumbling. "You don't know the guy, and you're already wanting to run off to New Orleans with him."

"Because he's funny. It's not like I'm gonna marry-oh." Realization dawned suddenly on her face. "You're jealous."

"No, I'm-"

"I didn't think you had it in you," she teased, playfully elbowing him in the side. "Louis has another emotion besides endless  
happiness."

"Sure." She reached over and took his hand in hers. 

"I'm not going to just take off with another group of Survivors. We're a family. A broken one now..." She looked mournfully down at the generator. "But a family. And families don't forsake each other."

"Yeah," he said, cracking a grin. "A family." She suddenly pointed out in the distance to an orange streak in the sky.

"Sun's coming up. We should get going soon. I'll wake Francis."

"Have fun with that," he teased, squeezing her hand. She rose to her feet and stretched before propping her hunting rifle up against the railing. 

"We'll talk about this later, okay?" she promised. "Let's get to the Keys and get settled."

"Definitely," he agreed. She made her way over to the doorway of the small shelter Francis was sleeping under and paused just outside of it.

"Although, I do want to say that I've always thought interracial kids are really cute." She disappeared into the shelter to wake Francis before her words registered in Louis's mind.

"Wait, what?!"


	6. Intuition

Louis supposes you never completely outgrow those moments of sudden clarity in realizing your mother had been right all along. As he’d grown older, these moments became fewer and farther in between—he had simply come to expect she was right about pretty much everything.

But even a mother’s reassurances seemed to ring hollow when someone he trusted as much as the woman who raised him had betrayed his trust in ten different ways in the span of ten seconds.

“I’ve been seeing someone else,” the woman he’d been preparing to spend the rest of his life with told him. “It isn’t fair to any of us for me to go through with this wedding. I’m sorry.”

His mother’s words of comfort seemed far away and empty that night as he’d cried on her couch, returned diamond ring in one hand and a beer he hadn’t touched in the other. After a while she realized he just needed to cry it out for a while, as much as it obviously pained her, so she had thrown a blanket over the both of them and turned on some ridiculous comedy movie he barely paid attention to.

“You’re gonna find her someday, Louis,” she’d said as he stretched out on the sofa to sleep and she was retreating to her bedroom. “You’re gonna find a woman who is strong and brave and smart and it is gonna be when you least expect it.”

“Yeah, Mom,” he’d replied absently, voice cracked from hours of on and off tears.

Three years later when his mother is gone because most of the entire damn world is gone, Louis glances over at the brown-haired girl propped up on the other side of the safehouse cleaning out her gun after another mad sprint through zombie infested streets. Zoey raises her eyes to meet his gaze and sticks her tongue out at him in a small attempt to bring a little laughter back into the world.

“Damn it, Mom,” he mutters.


End file.
